​Melbourne IT confirms massive DDoS attack

The company suffered a DDoS attack earlier today which rendered about 500,000 Australian websites inaccessible

Earlier today, Australia-based domain name registrar Melbourne IT confirmed that it had experienced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its DNS servers that disrupted its web hosting, email platforms, and access to the company’s customer administration portal.

A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack is a common method used by hackers to take down websites, email servers and other services which connect to the Internet. In a DDoS attack, servers are hit with so many requests that they stop responding.

It was reported that about 500,000 Australian websites were rendered inaccessible for up to 90 minutes, after the DNS servers of Melbourne IT’s sub-brands NetRegistry and TPP Wholesale suffered a cyberattack.

Melbourne IT said that the incident started at 10 AM AEST, in response to which it implemented its DDoS mitigation services as standard operating procedure as well as international traffic management measures.

Melbourne IT said that attack affected Melbourne IT and its subsidiaries Netregistry and TPP Wholesale, bringing down the company’s TheConsole, cPanel, Cloud Hosting, and Mail platforms services.